8 Email Marketing Tips for Improving Inbox Delivery Rate
Email marketing is still an effective method of reaching your audience and driving quality traffic. But if your email's end up in the Spam folder, all your hard work on crafting that killer campaign will be all for naught. Here's are 8 essential tips for making sure your emails land in the right place.
1. Validate your email list
Mailbox providers monitor IP addresses that continually send emails to invalid users and can flag you as a spammer if your bounce rate is consistently high.
Using a service like NeverBounce to periodically clean and verify your email list will help reduce bounce rate.
2. Warm up your IP address
Mailbox providers are suspicious of email coming from an IP that has no reputation. So if you're sending from a brand new email address, consider sending a few emails by hand to let your ISP know you're a legit sender and not a spammer.
3. Use a familiar sender name
Send the email from a real person. Recipients are typically more likely to trust a personalized sender name and email address than a generic one which will increase your open rate.
4. Avoid spam trigger words
One of easiest ways to avoid spam filters is by carefully choosing the words you use in your email's subject line and body copy.
Using words like "free," "guarantee," and "no obligation," can make the mailbox provider flag your messages as spam and hurt delivery rates.
5. Send text only emails instead of HTML
This is a heavily argued topic but in my opinion the more "human-like" your email's body copy, the more likely it is to be delivered to the inbox.
That said, if you’re going to send HTML emails, make sure it's is properly coded: If there are broken tags in your HTML, the email provider and users might mark it as spam.
6. Limit the number of images and image size
Using one large image as your entire email, or too many images in general, tends to end up in recipients' spam folders.
You'll also want to make your image file sizes as small as possible without losing their visual integrity to prevent long email load times.
7. Ask your subscribers to add you to their address book
Spam filters are more aggressive than ever and sometimes even the emails people want to read still end up in their spam box.
Subscribers can add you to their address book which tells the spam filters to whitelist your IP and back the fuck off.
8. Monitor your sender reputation
If you're sending email from an IP address with a poor reputation, your emails are less likely to be delivered to the recipient's inbox.
Use one of these tools to check your sending reputation.
The higher your score, the better your reputation and the higher your email deliverability rate.